Nostalgic thoughts

I had a very nice visit with my brothers in LA, as short as it was. Since my entire childhood of memory was spent in “the Valley” of “Valley Girls” fame, I get nostalgic every time I go there.



The house I lived in when my father died is two blocks off of the street I had to take to get to the hospital to see Bob, so I swung by just to see if it was how I remembered it. I was struck by the size of the entire neighborhood! When I was a kid, I thought the block was a lot longer than what it actually is. The driveway where my brother Tom broke his wrist while skateboarding looks exactly the same, but a lot closer to our house than I remembered. The house next door to the South has been torn down and a 3-story industrial company building is now there. The whole block used to be all houses on both sides of the street. Now, only the house I lived in and the one to the North of it are the only houses on “our” side of the street. The rest were torn down to make way for apartment buildings. And they are dumps! “My” house and the one next to it however, look like they were just recently painted and cleaned up. They are exactly the same color, so I assume both (probably) have the same owner now.


Looking at the house, I was stirred by so many memories! We moved into that house when I was about 8 years old, and we moved after my father died when I was 16. These are the years when most of us learn who we are (or think we are) and what we can do. Most of the anecdotes I’ve written about my childhood in this blog were experiences I gained while living in Northridge. Boy Scouts, altar boy, paper route, first car, first date, and my first migraine headache—they all happened there. The most stirring memory I had while looking at the front porch though was sitting on that porch and reading “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time from cover to cover in one afternoon. I don’t remember much else of the experience except that I did read it all in one fell swoop, and the title of the book. I was sooo proud of myself! I was about 12 years old.


As I write this blog, I am having a flood of other memories, but I don’t have the time or the inclination to go into them now, but maybe I’ll start another blog similar to Mom’s, where I just write about simpler times without all the “gadgets” that are in the world today and that take so many minds off of Christ’s message.
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Anybody that really knows me knows that I can’t just leave it at that, so I’ll write a couple of “for instances”:


As I drove back onto Reseda Blvd and made my way to the hospital, I chuckled to myself as I drove through the stoplight just past the overpass at Parthenia Avenue, where I got my first traffic ticket. Then I laughed out loud when I passed the “Jolly Jug” liquor store, where I spent a lot of my paper route money on candy and sodas! Some things just never go away! And by that, I mean both the liquor store and my habit of drinking sodas and eating candy!


And later, on the way to Bill and Wendy’s house, I was startled to see the “high-class” restaurant (the White Horse Inn) where I took my prom date for dinner looking so run down and classless. I guess time does that to buildings (ahem).

As enjoyable as this “walk down memory lane” was for me yesterday, none of those memories compares to the new ones created every day with my wife Marilyn, my daughters, and of course Lily Bug. When I came into the house tonight, she ran to me with her arms outstretched and jabbering a mile a minute! When I picked her up, she gave me a bear hug and patted my back just as I was doing with her. And then gave me a run down of what’s been happening the last couple of days around the house in “baby-speak”. A real Hallmark moment that I wouldn’t trade for all of my childhood memories!